On the surface, sending emails seems pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, like many things to do with servers, computers, and the internet in general, email is no cake walk.

Too many links in your email content, use of the color red, too many caps, too many images, and many more elements of an email can trigger the recipient’s spam filter to act. You can never guarantee that all of your emails will be received in every receiver’s inbox perfectly, but there are several things that you can do to help your cause.

SPF Record

In your DNS settings, you can add a txt record to enhance the validation of your emails. For example, if you’re using Google Apps emails, you can add “v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all” .

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email validation system designed to prevent email spam by detecting email spoofing, a common vulnerability, by verifying sender IP addresses.

Once you’ve added an SPF record to your domain name settings, and allowed it to fully process through the internet, you can test that it is working here with this SPF record tester.

Emails & WordPress

If you’re using WordPress as the CMS for your website, you may run into a problem with the php mailer processing emails from your website. For example, if your email address is [email protected] and you host your emails with Google , and you have a contact form on your website, domainname.com, you may have issues with receiving contact form entries because your email server is different from your website server, and your email server might reject the email coming from the same domain. This happens because your email server can see that it didn’t process the email itself, therefore it must be spam.

The best way to get around any problems with WordPress and emails is to use an SMTP Mail plugin . Once you install this plugin, and enter in your SMTP server details, any emails processed on your website will now use your email’s server to process the emails, rather than the built-in PHP mailer. This set up allows the email server to be involved in the process and as a result, helps to prevent spam issues.

If you’re experiencing email problems with a WordPress website, we can help. Click here and let’s get it figured out.